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You can’t ride a streetcar that isn’t there

Some of my earliest childhood memories involve the 506 Carlton streetcar. We lived in a little row house on Gerrard St. — 6841/2 was the charming address, though it felt less like a half-house than a full house to the two parents, four children and two cousins living in it. Every two minutes or less, the red rockets would rumble past my bedroom windows.

The Carlton car was a big presence in my early life, and a big presence in the city back then, too. In the late 1970s and the 1980s, that was one of the most heavily travelled surface transit routes in the city, trading the title of streetcar ridership champion with the 501 Queen car.

Ridership on the 506 Carlton streetcar has dropped over the past four decades, and the decline appears linked to how often they run, Edward Keenan writes. (Carlos Osorio / Toronto Star file)

That last bit might sound strange to readers today since, for the last good while, the 504 King route has lived up to its name as the undisputed streetcar monarch (64,600 riders per weekday in 2014), while the Carlton car is sort of middle of the pack (39,700 riders per weekday that year).

When I went, partly as a result of personal nostalgia, to see the history of that route — and how it fell off from its glory days when it carried more than 60,000 riders per day — I saw the oldest, most predictable story in transit, a lesson everyone should know by now but that our politicians and transit commissioners seem to periodically forget.

What happened was that the TTC cut service on the Carlton line: from every two minutes at its peak in the 1970s, to every three minutes in the 1980s, to every four minutes in 1996, to every four minutes and 20 seconds in the morning rush this January. And when they cut service, they lost ridership — more than a third of it over the decades.

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The connection between service levels and ridership makes absolute sense when you think about it: no one likes waiting, so if a bus or streetcar or subway comes often, you’re more likely to take it. That connection was borne out as perhaps the most important factor in ridership by a McGill University study of 25 transit systems. The headline was that boosting bus service, specifically, is the easiest way to improve transit. But the core finding seems less specific to the type of vehicle than to the frequency with which it arrives. More service equals more riders, and cuts in service result in fewer riders.

“This is not news,” Steve Munro said dryly when I asked him about the tight service-ridership connection.

The Carlton service frequency numbers come from Munro, a transit expert who has kept detailed records of TTC routes for decades. They are from the TTC’s own reports and releases, but he has tracked them and often has better access to them than anyone at the transit agency.

Munro made a chart comparing service miles and ridership on Carlton since 1976, and at pretty much every juncture you see a cut in service followed by a decrease in ridership. Especially notable was a dramatic cut in service in the late 1970s followed by about a 15 per cent decrease in ridership in the early 1980s, and then another deep service cut in the mid-1990s followed by an equally steep drop in ridership in the following years. Since about 2000, service and ridership have been fairly constant, at a plateau about a third lower than their late-1970s peaks.

Munro said the example that came more readily to mind for him was the 501 Queen, the longest streetcar line in the city, which was also the most-travelled route through much of the 1980s, with ridership numbers per day in the mid-60,000s. In 1990, he said, the TTC replaced the cars on that route with bigger, articulated models. Because they were bigger, they ran fewer of them, theoretically maintaining the same capacity for passengers but with vehicles arriving less frequently. It drove away a third of the ridership, he said, and the line has never recovered the number of riders as it had 30 years ago. The most recent numbers, from 2014, show it at 52,200 riders per day.

The experience of the King car shows much the same thing, but in the opposite direction. Munro’s chart shows ridership roughly tracking service miles (up and down) from the mid-1980s, and then both tracking dramatically up together over the past decade and a half. The early ridership estimates on King after the introduction of the pilot project there to improve service shows even more dramatic — and fast — gains.

There are other factors, of course. The development boom along King and the TTC’s response to it are certainly reflected in the changes over time. Recessions in the early 1980s and 1990s almost certainly influenced decisions and ridership levels on Carlton.

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But generally? More service equals more ridership.

That’s worth remembering the next time some politician suggests “trimming” service on an “underperforming” route. The solution to underperformance may actually be the opposite.

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